Nothing Goes According to Plan in Cambodia
In fact, you may find yourself regretting having even tried to make a plan in the first place. Today marks our two week anniversary in Cambodia. We were supposed to have flown to New Delhi a week ago. But journalism, it seems, is mostly about waiting.
In this case we were waiting for Cambodian government officials to sign a permit to allow Akira to bring the team of soldiers he trained to de-mine to the remote village of Chrun in Northern Cambodia. But bureaucracy moves slowly here, especially if you don’t have enough excess cash to set the wheels in motion with corrupt government officials.
So we wait. And the only one more impatient then us is Akira, because he knows that every day that goes by is another day the people in Chrun have to walk around in a minefield. Finally, he gets tired of waiting. When you grow up as a soldier in the middle of a messy guerilla war you learn how to improvise. You also learn that following the rules will only get you so far, and that a case of beer, a few extra packs of cigarettes, and some nerve might have to take over from there.
So Akira decides if he can’t bring the soldiers yet, he’ll go alone, and he can teach the villagers to disarm the mines themselves as he goes. And we’re going with him.
A few hundred kilometers on a dusty road and a harrowing half-hours moto ride on a sandy path through dense jungle later, we’re standing in the middle of a minefield with two Khmer Rouge soldiers. Akira was conscripted into the Khmer Rouge army as a boy, after his parents were executed for minor infractions. His uncle Rain, who we picked up at an army base on the way up, was a Khmer Rouge party member, and remained a soldier in their army until 1988. In fact, most people in this area of Cambodia who were alive in the Seventies were Khmer Rouge sympathizers, and though the soldiers here now wear Cambodian Army uniforms, they are almost all former Khmer Rouge.
The Cambodian genocide was uniquely horrifying in that its victims and perpetrators were often one in the same. When you hear of the atrocities committed the natural reaction is to search for someone to blame, but when the executioner is himself executed, and when children orphaned by genocide are conscripted and trained to commit genocide themselves, good and bad become hopelessly confused. Maybe that’s why the war crimes of the Khmer Rouge have gone unpunished. Even Pol Pot himself is rumored by some to have been killed by other KR leaders.
So despite the knowledge that the men we are with have probably killed several dozen people between the two of them, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be standing in this minefield with. They walk around casually, but warn us to stay still and only step where they say is okay. They’ve brought along a metal detector, which they don’t seem to have ever used before, but they wave it around in our path for appearances sake. Akira actually laid mines in this area himself, and years of experience both laying and avoiding them, he and his uncle know just where they might be placed, exactly what will set them off, and just how to step to avoid doing so. But this knowledge, or maybe its mostly instinct, is not easily imparted. So we suffer in the blazing afternoon sun, making impossibly slow progress through the quiet, dusty forest. Every time I start to lose my patience, I remember that it’s an impossibly thin line between a walk in the woods and a life spent on crutches, or worse. It’s a dilemma that I realize the people of this village have to live with every minute of their lives.
© 2006 The Common Language Project